Kathleen Peratis

I also don’t remember how I found the name of the abortionist. I do recall that a friend whose father was a major law enforcement official in Los Angeles drove me to a parking lot, where we were met by a young man who drove us to the site — a single-family home in Torrance. I had no appreciation for the medical or legal risks I was taking.

I bought 24 copies of “The New American Haggadah” sight unseen, based on the recommendation of a friend and the yiches of its creators, writers Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander. The aesthetic of the books is very Zen, very Steve Jobs: It’s light — literally, the paper seems nearly weightless — and spare, with monochromatic flying Hebrew letters.

Fawzi Yusef, a farmer in the West Bank village of Yanun, has been unable to reach his olive groves near the Itamar settlement for more than 10 years due to a “military closure.” He might have taken hope from a 2006 decision by Israel’s High Court of Justice. The court ruled that the Israel Defense Forces should refrain from preventing Palestinians from reaching their lands, absent real-time intelligence of threats on the ground.